If you’re like me, you love those foaming hand/dish soap dispensers. But they go empty so quickly, and you know you can’t just pour more soap in because it doesn’t work. Fill them with regular soap and hit the pump and it makes an asthmatic coughing sound and spits up a squirt of un-foamed soap.

Tip #1: Use your foam soap until the bottle is half empty. Open and remove the top, fill with water, put the top back on, and shake gently to mix. That’s it. You now have a full bottle of soap that will continue to foam.

Tip #2: Ok, so you’ve used all the soap in the dispenser. Don’t throw it away. Open the bottle and remove the top. Now take the same brand of liquid soap and fill the foaming dispenser so that it is 1/5 full. Now fill it the rest of the way up with water. Shake the bottle gently to thoroughly mix the soap and water. That’s it. You now have a full bottle of foaming soap.

All of the handsoaps are manufactured with a specific amount of preservative to keep the bacteria from growing. Once you dilute the soap with water as specified by the directions, you’ve cut the preservative in half. By the time you refill the bottle to 1/5 with new soap and dilute with water, you have 80% less preservative than you need. Bugs (bacteria) thrive on soap (surfactanct). Bacteria can double every 20 minutes. I would never wash my hands in buggy soap to save a few cents. UGH!

But I bet you use bar soap. Bar soap would contain more bacterium as it is usually handled by more than one person. Liquid soap is not handled at all. Not to mention the fact that one does not use soap to kill bacteria. One uses soap to allow the bacteria to be washed away easily. Soap doesn’t kill bacteria unless it’s anti-bacterial soap, and even then one must have contact with it for two minutes to be effective, and very few people actually wash their hands for a full two minutes. Bacteria also need a food medium to grow and soap is generally a non-nutritious and inhospitable environment for microbes. And last but not least, when you wash anything, from laundry to dishes, you don’t use full strength soap even there. You add it to water, usually in a lot greater ratio than 4 to 1.

Yes it took me awhile to adjust to the fact that it just didn’t require as much soap product as I was accustomed to using but the net effect is the bottle of Soft Soap now lasts much longer and my hands are just as clean as ever.